


Keep The Streets Empty For Me

by bodysnatch3r



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-10
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-29 01:18:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/999157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frerin is dead. Thorin found his body amidst the fallen of Azanulbizar, blood-covered and mangled. But ever since then the dwarf prince is certain he's started to lose his mind- because his little brother still walks amongst the living, in a haze of emptiness that makes his eyes cold and his words a whisper that chills Thorin to the bones every time he speaks.<br/>Frerin is asking for something- peace, the chance to move on, he is begging to be freed and left to walk the Halls of his ancestors.<br/>But his freedom will come at a terrible, terrible price. And Thorin is more than willing to pay it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep The Streets Empty For Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frerin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frerin/gifts).



> based on spookyfrerin's url. the plot bunnies happened, and there was nothing i could do to stop them. 

> I will never disappear  
> Forever, I'll be here  
> Whispering  
> Morning, keep the streets empty for me

Fever Ray - **[Keep The Streets Empty For Me](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY0A1eaqhSw)  
**

* * *

Thorin is standing on the brink of his mind and he is staring at the empty that lingers before him, inside of him, without him- within himself that is a shell that is a shadow that is the vase you broke and swept under the carpet when you were a little older than twenty-five and he was twenty, and now he’s forty eight, and he’s  _dead_ , and you wonder how these kind of things happen, how you let them happen, you wonder a million little shattered porcelain shards that are sticking under your skin and burrowing into your viscera. In the precise moment you laid your eyes upon his body you knew he was gone because there was a knot in your stomach that tore through you as you tore through corpses when he wasn’t amongst the living, and as that knot dissolved into the anguish that took hold of your throat you insantly knew you were gone, too, along with him and with your grandfather and father and all of the kin that you lost, you knew  _it_  was gone: whatever you were before the war and before the dragon and before this  _this moment right here_ , this precise repetition of madness that can be seen in the darker shade of blue your eyes are bleeding into. Thorin stares at his hands. His hands scare him.

They are torn and dirty and bleeding from where the oak cut into flesh, from where he grasped dirt and rock, from where he scraped his knuckles against armour, from where he dipped his fingertips into the madness that is war, war so bitter, so sharp, so staggering it fills his nostrils with the pungent, choking smell of other people’s blood. He is drenched in empty, and his brother is not amongst the living.

They dragged Frerin’s body into one of the tents after they dragged him off of it. His ( _their_ ) sister stared at it with a child’s eyes- the gaze of a girl who has all grown up much too soon, much too painfully, now blossoming into twisted metal pieces that will wilt wrong, tired, empty- but still broken  _and_  strong, a flower made of scraps of minerals. She will have her father’s stern jaw. She will have her mother’s tenderness, her older brother’s courage, her eldest brother’s sense of loss. 

Right now, Thorin glances at her and cannot force himself to look her in the eye because there is no light within the sea, no ocean’s spark, no wave’s white foam- her eyes are grey ponds of stagnant water as she swallows and stares at the mangled body in front of her. Dis will be a mother of missed kings. Dis will be a mother of fallen princes, she who is a sister to them already.

She finds the courage to look up at her still breathing brother but the only thing Thorin can do is lower his own eyes, darkened at the edges by guilt, and stare at the bloody hand limply dangling from the wooden table they laid him on, a hand that is so still it could be mistaken for granite, so caked in blood it was almost unrecognizable (and Thorin had nearly missed him, amongst the dead: but then his own eyes had met his brother’s blue ones, and the knot had come undone between his clenched fists clutching Frerin’s tunic). He loses himself in the dark thick blood under his brother’s nails and shields himself from his sister’s pleading eyes.

_Don’t leave me here alone_  she is asking without even realizing it.  _Do not leave me here to wade through mourning_.

But he does, because he is a coward.

Dis stares at him as he walks out and Balin just sighs and Thorin stands outside, heaves, leans forward. His hands are shaking, his hands are shaking, his hands are shaking. He buries his nails into his clothes and hopes his head will stop spinning- it doesn’t so he sits on blood drenched ground and stares at the quiet, empty battlefield in front of him and feels an oval-shaped cavern dig itself from the base of his throat (the soft spot between the collarbones) all the way down to his chest.

Which is when he sees him: wander in from the right, stop about a hundred feet away from him, bloodied and battered and in ruins. Impossible, a vision of shimmering air and wailing, dying men.

Frerin smiles at his brother: it is a desperate kind of smile.

Thorin blinks and nearly misses him because he’s there for a second, literally a second: a terrifying second during which he tricks himself into believing he is imagining him. But he’s there.

For a moment.

And then he’s gone- but the blue eyes were  _his_ , the dark hair was  _his_. It was a flicker of a thought that brushed against Thorin’s consciousness, a whisper left to linger within his empty little brain.

“ _Live_.” he hears his dead brother say.

Thorin tells himself he has imagined it.

* * *

But he lives.

But he fights.

He tears his way through guilt, through ruin, through the shame of asking to work for men, of begging for a raise, of arguing about prices, of being nothing but a shadow amongst giants. He who was a prince and then had kinghood thrust upon him, he who lead a lost people through the wilderness, he who killed the Pale Orc, he who held a dead brother, he who failed his sister, he who lost his world to a dragon.

Thorin Oakenshield sits at the fireplace and warms his hands. It’s snowing and it reminds him of mountains: he does not know if this is a good thing, or just another thing to add to the thoughts that have been digging through the oval shaped hole in his chest, exposed ribs and exposed lungs and exposed heart throbbing away, and every beat eats his skin a little more, every breath is jagged along the edges.

He pokes the coals and laughter trickles down his spine.

It is a desperate kind of laugh.

He welcomes the blood dripping from his brother’s smiling mouth with open arms. Dis is sleeping in his room, a small blond child curled up against her chest, her belly rounded by another on their way. Thorin has been sleeping (fitfully, little, plagued by nightmares, knees bunched up against his chest) in the main room’s armchair for a month now, ever since her husband was torn away from them with brute force and bloody, shuddering breaths. The lung sickness, swift, had made him bleed from the mouth, reduced his breathing to rattles, reduced his skin to sickly yellow ash. He’d died quickly and painfully and no one had been able to stop it, and now she has nothing left except for blond hair and green eyes and a sweet timid smile and what will be ebony and darkness and cocky smirks. They will sing tales of the Lost Princes and she will lament their deaths in the darkest months, and she will wear black, and mourning will draw thin creases along her mouth, under her eyes. But she will still hold her head high, she will still speak, she will still sing. Mahal made her strong, the strongest of the three. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Thorin sees blood drip and stain the wooden floor.

"You’ll ruin the rug," he mumbles quietly, to not wake their sister.

Frerin twists his broken neck to stare at his older brother. “You know it won’t leave a mark.”

Every word is a gush of red down his chin, mixing with his beard, barely stubble, black made even darker by blood, and Thorin wishes he didn’t have to look. But he looks. He looks  _every time_.

"You seem tired," his little brother says. Thorin stares at him blankly.

"I am."

Frerin scoffs. Thorin just wishes he would _leave_ , and he presses the heels of his palms against his eyes and ends up burying his face in his hands.

"What do you want?" he asks crossing his arms and knows he won’t get an answer. Frerin _never_ answers the important questions, he just stares. He just gives him that desolate little smile of his. He just lingers, sticking to the cracks between his bones.

"The babe will look like his father." he answers instead, looking away from his brother and towards the shut door behind which Dis is sleeping. "And Fili will look like me. Will you be able to look him in the face, or will that scare you too much?"

In his words there's what would be emotion if Frerin were made of flesh and bone. But the words are just an empty rattle, and there's a thin, thin, almost invisible layer of sarcasm coating them. The shame still plagues Thorin and still enrages Frerin  _you left her there with my body_.  _you left her there to cry because you could not face yourself for letting me die_. He is not spiteful for his death, though. He is spiteful for his sister's abandonement, for Thorin's lack of courage.

The concept is loud enough and sharp enough for even Thorin to be able to sense it.

"Go back to where you came from, Frerin." he hisses (the words bury themselves in his palate like ice and stone and glass) standing up. He stares at the ghost who stares back. Thorin blinks. Frerin doesn’t.

"I have nowhere to go, _brother_."

It is a dead man's lament he does not know how to console. Thorin wishes he could scream, but instead he concentrates on the way the fire twists around itself and eats away at the wood, and he clutches and unclutches his fists, and when he closes his eyes and opens them again his brother is standing close to him, and there is only empty in the sadness in his eyes, a longing for lands forbidden. "The Halls will not take me, brother. You know that. I am chained here."

Thorin shakes his head, "You do not belong in the Halls, you belong in my mind and in my nightmares and you aren't  _him, you can't be him_."

(He's heard from Oin of soldiers who'd never really left the battlefield, who still walked it during their dreams, who saw their comrades' bodies lying in everyday dust. He's been told about it. He knows it is a heavy burden to carry).

Frerin's staring at the embers too, now. "I am him." he murmurs. But his brother just scoffs, and he can feel the veil between them tighten.

* * *

" _ **He** started it_!"

Fili's snarl is the vicious snarl of a wronged older sibling, as Thorin pulls him off of a wailing Kili, thrashing and kicking and blazing eyes, blond hair falling across his face in a sweaty mess. Dis is helping scrawny Kili up, whose eyes are as dark as his father's and whose cheeks still haven't shown even the signs of the faintest stubble. His eyes are big pools of tears as much as his brother's are a deep enraged chasm- and as Thorin turns him around to scold him, he sees Frerin's ferocious snarl in place of his face, green eyes for a second turn blue, blond goes black. 

_or will that scare you too much_

He stares at the proud child in front of him. And Frerin -  _the Ghost_ , the Nightmare, the Thing, because he doesn't want to let himself acknowledge that his little brother might still be somehow lingering, trapped between this world and the next - was right. Whatever _it_ was, it knew this was going to happen.

Frerin had seen it, which meant he _knew it_ , which means he's beyond them, beyond Thorin, beyond their petty lives and worthless existences. Frerin is beyond their day-to-day struggle and is beyond their sick, broken pride and is beyond everything they've grown into, everything they've become. And yet he lingers. And yet he's trapped, feeling desperately through others the pain and the love and the _life_ he is forbidden to step either out of or back into. He walks just above the fabric of reality, and between it, never touching either side of it. It is an ache that spreads from his chest like blood spreading in water, and washes over Thorin in deep, dark waves. Even Dis can sense it, at times, a familiar voice, a familiar sound, the clinging of laughter against wind chimes. It's sunny outside- autumn bleeding into summer. 

Fili stares at his uncle, massaging his brusied jaw and scowls at his younger brother for hitting him. It's almost his same scowl, only that the colors are switched- Fili is the perfect negative image of his dead uncle. Thorin finds him again in a young prince's eyes and he didn't ask for this, didn't need this, _didn't want this_.

A knowing sigh sets itself into Thorin's bones. For a moment he looks at his sister, hopeful, but she is oblivious, quietly scolding her younger child. Frerin is Thorin's ghost and Thorin's alone, and the sound of his sighing ices Thorin's bones and he doesn't turn to face his little brother, but he forgets the words he wanted to snarl at his nephew, for a moment he forgets who he is.

* * *

"What do you _want_?"

It is the millionth time he asks this, and he doesn't shy away from the empty eyes this time, he doesn't hide from the blood and the torn fingers, the broken bones, the bloody shattered armour. He doesn't hide because he has been emptied out, dug out, clawed out, his entrails rest between clutched fingers and he is  _bleeding himself dry_ , Frerin is a shadow in a step in a breath, always behind him, relentlessly, he blinks and he's there, he shuts his eyes to sleep and he can feel the presence linger, he tries to chase him away but Frerin does not budge.

Frerin stares, and that's all he does apart from the occasional word bled through tired lips: his eyes always a little bit sad, a little bit knowing, a little bit (too much, too bloody much _oh Mahal grant him the rest he needs_ ) empty.

He didn't care that the men working with him at the forge thought of him as a little bit out of his mind, it doesn't matter that Dis' been eyeing him, worried, whenever he stares at a spot for too long, that Dwalin can sense that something's just  _not right_ \- he doesn't care because there's a ghost that's been gnawing at his very core for years and years and years, for a century and more, empty eyes watching every move, and decision, and thought. None of that matters now, because he needs and demands the answers he thinks the world owes him.

He needs and demands the forgiveness he has not yet granted himself.

Thorin stands in his sleeping quarters in Ered Luin and stares at Frerin. Thorin clenches his jaw and, of course, Frerin doesn't move, the gash that split his chest in two is immoble. There is no breath reaching his lungs. His cells are beyond oxygen, his atoms entwined with something that throbs deep within the world, a power, a vein of old, dark magic few know the secrets to. And those who do do not speak of it.

The dead prince stares at his brother and beyond his brother and within his brother, and the five words he's about to utter will tear through Thorin like claws, sink their teeth into his jugular, bleed him dry and make him walk again, renewed, different, a king to be safe in his step and fragile in his insecurities.

"I want to go home." Frerin whispers, and the bones in his neck crack when he tilts his head to stare at the floor.

* * *

There are thirteen of them, plus a wizard, plus a burglar whom Thorin doubts to the very core. But the other are men Thorin trusts, or men he's been told are trustworthy. 

Frerin stands at the back, behind Bilbo, as his brother yells "Du Bekar!" and shakes his fist and feels alive for the first time in what is undoubtedly a lifetime (but he knows the other's there, he knows it, and he's doing all of this for him. He's taking one last leap into the empty, one last flight into madness, and all for his little brother. He's tearing himself out of the shell, he's facing his demons- the ones only living in his head. Outside, one is enough).

Fili and Kili both asked and convinced him to let them come along, and this fills him with a paralizing terror. One ghost is enough.

He can live with just one ghost, alongside his father and grandfather. One ghost is less scary than three, is less scary than four, than the empty shell his sister would break into were her children to be taken from her.

(And yet she is the strongest of the three).

* * *

When the wolf buries her teeth into him he sees pain, he sees nothing, he sees darkness. He hears Dwalin scream his name, the hysterical sound of a desperate dwarf, and then he feels ground against his bleeding back and blood pool in his mouth. Thorin stares at the merciless sky above him, at the fresco of stars, and then there's a flurry of blue- Bilbo flings himself against the Warg, Thorin lets himself slip away although he is digging his nails and his teeth and his claws into every breath.

> _Not yet_ ,  _Frerin says. He looks more real than he has for such a long time. Thorin stares at him and he stares at his brother and Frerin's eyes are gleaming._
> 
> _What do you mean, not yet? he asks. There are bite marks running through his chest. The hilltop is gone, the fire is gone, the trees have melted away. This is an outskirt of reality, greys mixing with yellows mixing with blues. He breathes and Thorin feels like he is made of smoke. Frerin shakes his head._
> 
> _Not yet, he says again_.  _I need you to do this last thing. You need to do this last thing. For me. For yourself._
> 
> _What if I can't?_
> 
> _The sorrowful smile doesn't change. It is still Frerin, after all, dead or not, ghost or not, empty or full or alive or just a dream._
> 
> _You will_.

Thorin opens his eyes, back against hard rock. He's still alive, eagles storming around them, lifting themselves into the blue until they're nothing but specks, a God's whisp of will.

" _Live_." he hears his brother breathe.

* * *

The dragon is a flurry of reds and golds, a deafening scream, a monster made of ash and rage and darkness burning, swirling, greed trapped within staggering eyes, talons tearing through the mountain's flesh.

Smaug screams and Thorin's heart beats in his ears, desperate.

He realizes what's about to happen a moment too late, he realizes he is not ready for this a moment too late, he turns around and his brother is staring at him and his brother is smiling, his brother is flesh and blood, for a moment his brother is _there_ , real like any other memory, but then Bard the Bowman points the arrow as fire swirls around him, hair matted to his forehead, the city a whithering screaming desperate thing as Smaug vomits his rage onto her. Laketown trembles and Thorin clenches his teeth and Frerin is  _smiling through the blood Frerin is happy Frerin is free_.

The arrow hits the beast.

Thorin isn't ready to say goodbye but he is not the one to decide, he never was, and then Frerin just nods at him and bids him the farewell they never got, he does not mention Dis as he unravles, and then Smaug is dying, and Thorin can only stare.

His brother becomes ash, smoke, suddenly, grey no one else sees except for him. And the chasm that starts from Thorin's throat and reaches the middle of his chest caves in for good.

He is not ready for solitude, he feverishly thinks. And Frerin was there and then he blinked and he _wasn't_ and his tongue tells him he is gone for good. The cold in his bones has dissipated, now there's nothing but handfuls of memories and of dreams and of his own guilt. And it's  _over_ his brain tells him, but it cannot be over because he doesn't want to let himself believe it. 

Loneliness, he understands too late, is something he is not accustomed to. He was lonely in Frerin's misery, yes, but this is another thing entirely. This is utter loneliness, utter absence, a cold different from a ghost's cold. 

Thorin is tired, all of a sudden. His breath is short. His hands are clammy, cold, are shaking.

He does not want to walk his father's halls.

* * *

> _I thought you were gone. he says. There's a hole torn in his chest by a spear that was pulled out of his already dying body by sturdy, tattooed hands. He feels lightheaded, lighthearted, free in a way he cannot truly even understand._
> 
> _Frerin is staring at him, broken neck slightly tilted. He smiles._
> 
> _I waited, he whispers._
> 
> _I'm scared. Thorin says, and regrets it._
> 
> _We all are at the beginning. It's just a matter of._
> 
> _Of?_
> 
> _Of getting used to it, I guess._
> 
> _Thorin lowers his head and stares at the smoke that is grass that is solid and liquid and clouds at the same time. He takes a few steps forward. He does not slip through the ground like he thought he would. His brother is patiently waiting, hand outstretched. Thorin grabs it, without thinking. Solid and tangible and there for the first time in so long. If he still could, he would cry. They both know this._
> 
> _And then Thorin asks the question he's been needing to ask- it stick to his skull in a painful, skin-melting way. An ache, a dull throb._
> 
> _Are they-?_
> 
> _We're right here._
> 
> _And it's Fili's voice, Kili behind him, dark eyes a different shade of bewilderment entirely. Thorin stares at them, for a moment he wishes he could will himself to speak but suddenly (a notion that feels like a butterfly's wings against the back of his soul) he knows there is no need for an apology. He stares at the three, and knows they know he is sorry, he knows they know that if he could, he'd go back and fix it all, dress every wound, heal every heart. They know this, and they are grateful for it._
> 
> _He did good, more good than was ever asked of him._
> 
> _And this, he knows, is worth more than all the gold in Erebor._


End file.
